Grants talk:Project/WMDRC-UG/WMDRC - UG 2020 Activities

Grantee

Is the grantee Wikimedians of Democratic Republic of Congo User Group, i.e. some incorporated entity under its responsibility or acting as its fiscal sponsor, or an individual? Please clarify. Nemo 13:55, 23 February 2020 (UTC)

We are just a Wikimedia User Group, not an incorporated entity. --BamLifa (talk) 14:23, 29 February 2020 (UTC)

Thank you. Some user groups are incorporated, hence the question. Nemo 17:27, 29 February 2020 (UTC)

We are discussing on how to be incorporated. Is this mandotory for project grant? --BamLifa (talk) 08:30, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

Eligibility confirmed, Round 1 2020

This Project Grants proposal is under review!

We've confirmed your proposal is eligible for Round 1 2020 review. Please feel free to ask questions and make changes to this proposal as discussions continue during the community comments period, through March 16, 2020.

The Project Grant committee's formal review for Round 1 2020 will occur March 17 - April 8, 2020. We ask that you refrain from making changes to your proposal during the committee review period, so we can be sure that all committee members are seeing the same version of the proposal.

Grantees will be announced Friday, May 15, 2020.

Any changes to the review calendar will be posted on the Round 1 2020 schedule.

Questions? Contact us at projectgrants wikimedia  · org.

I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 21:28, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

Some questions/suggestions

I have a few questions for you to answer and some suggestions:

1. "It is the 90th WP with more than 55 million articles." You probably meant 55 thousand articles.
2. As you are planning to create Tshiluba WP, what is the current state of it in the incubator?
3. Regarding your planned results (in the table), do all numbers refer to each language separately or to the overall number of articles, participants and contributors?
4. In the "Participants" section I see some wikicode fragments. The sections looks incomplete to me.

Ruslik (talk) 20:33, 4 March 2020 (UTC)

@Ruslik0:: Thank you so much for your questions and suggestions. My answers below:

1. I agree with you here, it's a typo.
2. We have not yet jumped there. It is the next step after we have finished togather all info
3. Numbers refer to the overall number of articles, participants and contributors
4. You're right. Will fix it.

--BamLifa (talk) 15:53, 6 March 2020 (UTC)

Feedbacks on Anthere's comment

I am writing these few lines to clarify and/or explain about some @Anthere:'s fear on our proposal.

First, let me quote them (Anthere)

"I am generally in support with the idea (in particular because this is the path to increase awareness in Congo, step by step; Promote the project, train new people, recruit new people etc. and with years of experience doing this... we know it is needed and we already know what could go wrong, so nothing really unexpected might occur here). But I fear the team might be too optimist about its capacity to actually implement all what is planned here. They are only a handful and what they plan must be done from scratch entirely (= it is not linked to a specific global drive that could already provide part of the com for example). And I think it is a lot to put on the plate, especially when compared to the current group reported activity at Wikimedians of Democratic Republic of Congo User Group. So... I believe the group definitely needs support... but maybe this request is a bit too large for what they could actually implement. I noted that they asked or drafted grants for other projects in the past few months. Some drafts were never finished. Some requests were considered ineligible because the group was out of compliance due to missing reports on other grants. I am not saying that they should not be supported (they should be), but to the extent of what they can actually absorb. Anthere (talk)"

From my understanding, apart from their support, Anthere fistigates that we are only a handful and cannot be capable to implement such a large project due to our past record (score?). We don't think that this is a too big project. No, not at all. Unless they give us the measurement used to call a project too big or too small. We always run activities where we manage more people and that for a long time ago. What's the problem then or why were we out of compliance? Before answering this question, let me give a little anecdote. Last year we were in Uganda for WM2030 East Africa Summit. We have discovered that we run too many activities than most attendees (User Group represented) but what we do is not known by the community, i.e we don't communicate much on that. To answer the question I have to say that we are a french UG, but most discussions or reports or communications in WMF are done in English, there's not at all a medium for french speakings though you can say that available mediums are language barriers-free. If we were out of compliance it was not because we could not implement the activity, but because we did not notify the grant team about the last Changement on the program (especially the end date), i.e it is not about capability, but just a little issue that might occur to any project.

For us, this is not a big project, but it is a time consuming one.

FYI I am the country coordinator for WikiFranca, co-organizer of Wikiconvention Francophone since 2017 (scholarship team or internal communication team), we run more than on projects in just one month for Mois de la contribution francophone (we have 6 for this month), we do Kiwix outreach (100+ installations).

We have learned from our past mistakes, which is about communication. We are trying our best to communicate especially in English. We are waiting for a website, we have a Facebook page and soon a twitter one.

For those who are curious, here are some links to our activities:

• https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMDRC-UG/Salon_Strat%C3%A9gique/Rapport_Janvier-F%C3%A9vrier_2020
• https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/2019_Community_Conversations/Strategy_Salons/Reports/WMDRC-UG
• https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Atelier_de_Renforcement_de_capacit%C3%A9_Kisangani_2019
• https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Reports#Wikimedia_User_Groups

--BamLifa (talk) 17:39, 12 March 2020 (UTC)

Aggregated feedback from the committee for WMDRC - UG 2020 Activities

Scoring rubric	Score
(A) Impact potential Does it have the potential to increase gender diversity in Wikimedia projects, either in terms of content, contributors, or both? Does it have the potential for online impact? Can it be sustained, scaled, or adapted elsewhere after the grant ends?	7.5
(B) Community engagement Does it have a specific target community and plan to engage it often? Does it have community support?	4.5
(C) Ability to execute Can the scope be accomplished in the proposed timeframe? Is the budget realistic/efficient ? Do the participants have the necessary skills/experience?	4.5
(D) Measures of success Are there both quantitative and qualitative measures of success? Are they realistic? Can they be measured?	5.5
Additional comments from the Committee: Fits with strategic directions of knowledge equity and knowledge as service by focusing on activities and infrastructure to support smaller and new (to Wikimedia) language communities. Interesting project to involve local communities. DRC is underrepresented on Wikimedia projects both in terms of contents and contributors. If they are able to execute this project, it would be a great impact. Important project that has the potential to have a significant impact on a number of underrepresented languages. One potential risk is around the creation of a Tshiluba Wikipedia. Little details are provided around the planning for this new project. The project is still drafted and it is not clear how it can be managed. The idea is to use Zoom but I see that the same team is asking for money to have internet, so I don't know how many attendees can have an internet access. In my opinion the project is still naif and does not consider all risks. It isn't clear from the proposal how the grantee would track impact after the project is completed. If the project is mostly around article translation is there an opportunity to work with Wikidata and identify gap on English/French Wikipedia content relating to those language communities and their cultures. How will project address issues around reliable sources in those languages? I like that this project is passionate about the language diversity of the DRC but it also seems overly ambitious to focus on 4 languages in one project. I would recommend a smaller scale pilot project that focuses on 1-2 local languages and more sustained contributions from editors. Quite skeptical about the impact. It can be done but I don't consider that it can have a lot of followers. It is very unlikely for this project to be successfully executed with the current plan. They need to start with something small. Maybe a rapid grant to train, let's say, 20 people before making an attempt to train over a hundred people. With a small number of trainees, they could effectively measure impact and learn about what works well and what needs to be improved in a slightly bigger project. Experienced project team. Conference is an interesting activity but there's no mention of potential partners. How will connectivity issues be addresses - not clear in the budget. It’s not clear what approach the team will take to outreach, identifying participants, promoting the editing activities, etc. How will project recruit and identify "language specialists"? Would be more inclined to support if there a more manageable scope (e.g., focus on 1-2 local languages before looking to launch another Wikipedia); detailed budget with proposed hours and activities for salaried employees; and more clarity around proposed activities - currently there is a mix of project-focused and regular user group activities. I always have the problem of checking how the budget is calculated and especially if the cost of human resources has been calculated using the country's wage base. In this case it seems to me calculated using very summary numbers and this does not give me confidence on the calculation of the whole budget and on the setup of the project. It is a 6 month project with a project management salary of $ 6,000. How was the definition of this amount made? The project is not contextualized and assumes that people can connect remotely, but how big is the presence of the Internet connection and the possession of a laptop for potential contributors? If the project must include the purchase of a laptop and internet connection for the organizers, this makes me suppose that distance learning could be very critical. The project must have some external references to mitigate the risks indicating with statistics and data that the risks have been considered and that the project has the possibility of mitigating them. I am not comfortable recommending funding with the current plan. The grantee should review their proposal so that it focuses on one language Wikipedia and reduced the number of trainee by at least 50%. The budget should be broken down and the cost of project management should not be more than 10 - 12% of the total budget. Yes to funding but would like to see the project team expand on how they will recruit editors with these language skills, articulate approaches to working in partnership and identify potential partners for the conference, and include activity to participate and share learning with wider Wikimedia community at events like Wiki Indaba, Wikimedia Language Diversity, Wikimania, WikiFranca etc and in online community spaces.

This proposal has been recommended for due diligence review.

The Project Grants Committee has conducted a preliminary assessment of your proposal and recommended it for due diligence review. This means that a majority of the committee reviewers favorably assessed this proposal and have requested further investigation by Wikimedia Foundation staff.

Next steps:

• Aggregated committee comments from the committee are posted above. Note that these comments may vary, or even contradict each other, since they reflect the conclusions of multiple individual committee members who independently reviewed this proposal.
• If you have had an interview with a Program Officer, you may have orally responded to some of the committee comments already. Your interview comments will be relayed to the committee during the deliberations call.
• You are welcome to respond to aggregated comments here on the talkpage to publicly share any feedback, clarifications or questions you have.
• Following due diligence review, a final funding decision will be announced on May 29, 2020.

If you have any questions, please contact us at projectgrants wikimedia  · org.

--Marti (WMF) (talk) 23:12, 13 May 2020 (UTC)

Round 1 2020 decision

Congratulations! Your proposal has been selected for a Project Grant.

WMF has approved partial funding for this project, in accordance with the committee's recommendation. This project is funded with US$7,175

Comments regarding this decision:
The Project Grants Committee has approved partial funding of this proposal to support:

• a small pilot version of the proposed project to do outreach to a single small language community
• an investment into training and capacity development to help the User Group to prepare for later transition into Simple Annual Plan Grants.

As discussed in our call on May 25, 2020, Woubzena Jifar, Program Officer for Simple Annual Plan Grants and Marti Johnson, Senior Program Officer for Project Grants will work with you in the coming month to finalize the components of capacity development for the User Group and approve a project budget for the pilot. Please do not begin work on your project until this step is complete.

We look forward to collaborating with you!

Next steps:

1. You will be contacted to sign a grant agreement and setup a monthly check-in schedule.
2. Review the information for grantees.
3. Use the new buttons on your original proposal to create your project pages.
4. Start work on your project!

Upcoming changes to Wikimedia Foundation Grants

Over the last year, the Wikimedia Foundation has been undergoing a community consultation process to launch a new grants strategy. Our proposed programs are posted on Meta here: Grants Strategy Relaunch 2020-2021. If you have suggestions about how we can improve our programs in the future, you can find information about how to give feedback here: Get involved. We will launch our new programs in July 2021. If you are interested in submitting future proposals for funding, stay tuned to learn more about our future programs.

Revised Project Grant Goals and Activities

Per the details of the decision above, I am noting here the revised goals and activities for this Project Grant. The Wikimedians of Democratic Republic of Congo User Group (Grantee) worked with Mjohnson (WMF) (Program Officer) and agreed upon the following Project goals and grant activities.

Project Goals:

1. We will work with the Wikimedia Foundation to train and build capacity among the core leadership team of the User Group.
2. We will conduct a pilot program for local language contributors.
3. We will continue to support user group members.

Project scope and list of activities:

1. Capacity Building for leadership team: Months 1-3
2. Material prep/logistic: Months 1-3
3. Support user group members: Months 1-6
4. Pilot: Months 3-4

-- JTud (WMF), Grants Administrator (talk) 23:55, 29 September 2020 (UTC)